Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of war as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. Finell depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed;
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On what may be the last day of his life, Captain Frederick Benteen — the man who saved portions of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry from almost certain death at Little Bighorn — receives a letter from an ambitious boy offering to “restore” his reputation. Over the twenty-three long years since that battle, watching Custer’s legend grow, Benteen has brooded silently on the past. His General has been dead for more than twenty years, killed in action, considered a hero, while the public has never forgiven Benteen for surviving. Now, at last, he begins to put down some account of those two horrific days pinned down on a ridge.
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Three wounds in a perfectly straight line was the bloody signature that marked victims from every corner of France who had been murdered at regular intervals over the course of thirty years. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, is deeply and personally familiar with the case, and though others were always framed and convicted for these crimes, including his own brother, the Commissaire knows the true identity of the killer—and knows that the murderer died in 1987. All the more disturbing, then, is Adamsberg’s discovery one morning of a fresh murder with exactly the same profile. Stunned into action—and himself a suspect—Adamsberg must confront the mysterious return of an old,
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Showcasing the intensity and perception of a truly gifted writer, this collection of stories by the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter transports us to exotic locations as it follows the lives of those on the fringes of society—a fire-eater, an American and his Korean war bride, a juggler and a trapeze artist, a cleaning woman whose life is interwoven with Marie Curie’s. Each must confront, in dramatically different ways, the barriers of time, place and circumstance in that most universal of human experiences: the quest to discover, and understand,
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Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her.
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Once in a Promised Land is the story of Jassim and Salwa, who left the deserts of their native Jordan for those of Arizona, each chasing mirages of opportunity and freedom. Although the couple lives far from Ground Zero, they cannot escape the dust cloud of paranoia settling over the nation. A hydrologist, Jassim believes passionately in his mission to make water accessible to all people, but his work is threatened by an FBI witch hunt for domestic terrorists. A Palestinian now twice displaced, Salwa embraces the American dream. She grapples to put down roots in an unwelcoming climate,
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